LIGHTNOVELONLINE The Hungry Ghost 1
Musky air steamed out from a vent in a stinking vaporous cloud as a train passed underneath, shaking the ground and rattling a fire escape above. Maki and I smoothly evaded it as we hurried towards Tamaki Grill, instincts honed from years of city living. I thanked the light drizzle for evaporating the concentrated subway smell quickly.
My eyes locked onto every street cat we passed; my mind occupied by idle plans of vengeance. If there was anywhere in the city I could find a cat to fight the rat menacing my apartment, it would probably be in Little Tokyo, was the thought. The weather was growing cold – I could probably trade one of these strays warmth and shelter in exchange for a little pest control. That was a bargain as old as agriculture. I just needed to find a real killer, the feline equivalent of a street samurai to match the vermin ninja haunting my apartment.
“I’ve never been close to two high level martial artists fighting before,” said Maki, interrupting my thoughts. “Your ki is radically different from anything I’ve experienced.”
Maki gripped my arm possessively, the embarrassment of being seen with me having passed. Still, it wasn’t from affection, I didn’t think, more that she seemed worried I’d run off if she didn’t keep a close tab on me. You front flip away from a date into a full street performance one time and they start getting clingy – go figure.
“How do you mean?” I asked, turning my attention away from a particularly scarred cat warming itself atop a convenience store’s lit-up sign. That was a good spot, they probably fought for it. “I’m totally self-taught, so I don’t know how it’s supposed to work.”
She leaned in closer to speak quietly, painting a romantic image to outside observers. “It’s hard for me to speak with authority, my senses aren’t as refined as I would like them to be. I’ve observed a few types of spiritual power, from Kami, normal humans, and now martial artists. Kami are comprised equally of spirit and intent. Everything they do and are, is a manifestation of their purest selves. It’s not that they use spiritual power, but rather, they simply make their wills reality, with what they can do being limited by what they are.”
“And people?” I asked.
“I really don’t know anymore. If you had asked me yesterday, I would have said that people are mind, body, and spirit, and that they can learn to manifest their spirits through deliberate meditation or prayer. We use talisman making and calligraphy for example. Before you can bind borrowed power from a Kami, in our families at least, you must first prove you can draw from your personal intent and will. But now…”
She paused to gather her thoughts before continuing, “You and Hadiman used your spiritual pressure completely differently from what I’ve known. I assumed that ki was merely a different word for what I knew, and it is, somewhat, but at the same time, it’s nowhere close. There was so much more…physicality to it. And the truly confounding thing, is that beyond the shared base of physicality, yours and Hadiman’s ki were completely unique from one another’s as well.”
I nodded, thinking back to how Pak extended his whip, lengthening its every thread with pure Qi. If I hadn’t seen it in action, I would have had no idea where to even begin developing a technique like that. “Yeah, Pak’s finesse is really otherworldly. I guess that’s what happens when you train knife fighting your entire life.”
“Much like how develop our spiritual control through the use of calligraphy and meditation?”
“Exactly. Swordsmen love training calligraphy for that reason as well, and is a knife really all that different from a calligraphy brush? The ink is your opponent’s blood, and the rice paper is his skin.”
“A distasteful analogy, but I suppose at some level you must be—"
Maki went quiet as we passed a group of four younger Yakuza members huddled under the covered entrance to a smoke shop. Neither she nor I had been reacting to the gang presence thus far, so I was a bit surprised to see her stop herself, until the group caught sight of me, at which point it became obvious that something was different. The three youngest stiffened and stood up straighter as I passed, visibly annoying their oldest companion with their lack of subtlety.
It was crazy to me that Maki had noticed the change in their mannerisms prior to them spotting us. They had looked completely unremarkable to me, only notable for their age, and the fact that two of them had been playing on handheld gaming consoles unique to this world. But then, Maki had been impressing me with her ability to read people the whole night. The woman had a seriously freakish Insight and/or a set of nasty feats that would make her deadly in a poker game.
“How did mine and Pak’s Qi differ?” I asked once we were past the group.
“You were completely different. Hadiman’s ki felt like a bundle of tightly coiled steel wires, whereas yours is hard to even describe. At first, when you used your ki to stomp the dust into a cloud, and then again, when you drew the mist down to banish it, you felt like a roaring bonfire. When you headbutted Hadiman’s whip back at him though – I almost don’t want to say, out of fear of coming across as histrionic – but it was like witnessing a volcanic eruption. I realized that I had been looking at not a bonfire, but rather a roiling caldera earlier. Everyone even slightly sensitive in Little Tokyo must have felt the spiritual shockwave.”
I groaned loudly and palmed my face. “Goddamn it. I really wish you hadn’t said that last part.”
“My apologies.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I sighed. “What’s a few more targets on my back at this point?”
“For what it’s worth, my family is well respected here. People will at least think twice before moving on you now that we’ve seeded the idea of our intimacy.”
“Thanks. We’re probably not going to keep fake dating after tonight, but I appreciate it nonetheless. And thanks for the Qi breakdown. You’re the only person I know who will talk to me about this.”
“I thought you came from a martial family.”
“Yeah, but I awakened my Qi on my own after I left to start my own style.”
“Oh? Hadiman complemented your family for producing your new style a few times though. I would have thought that they would take pride in your new art. Your family didn’t take your decision well?”
We paused at a red crosswalk. Little Tokyo was the only neighborhood in the city where I felt weird jaywalking.
“It’s complicated. My mother initially banned me from teaching the family Eagle Claw style, but I guess she’s come to terms with it. Back in Hunan, I know my grandfather is pretty pissed, but my great-grandfather started sending me DVDs of his favorite action movies on my birthday. Regardless, I wouldn’t ask them about it even if I could, and my mother for sure wouldn’t answer if I did.”
She tensed and I could see her bite back her first comment. Maki had been making an effort to be a bit friendlier since the Caci game with Pak.
“That’s a little…Many go mad pursuing the way of the immortal, do they not? Would your mother really deny you? Some might call that cruel.”
“It is cruel. It’s the same cruelty that creates the deadly Eagle’s Claw.” I reached for the brick wall and casually carved a small channel as we walked, flicking the dust off into the rain.
Maki tugged at my arm hard. “Tch. Don’t commit property damage to make a point, you ogre!” She…wasn’t great at being friendly, but I could tell that she was trying. Who knows how she would have reacted prior to the Caci duel.
“Haha, sorry, sorry,” I said with a chagrined smile. “I really didn’t think at all before I did that. Haha! Oh man.”
She made a sound of frustration and shot me an absolutely scathing look. “Anyway, I do follow your argument. You and your mother both believe her helping you will make you weaker in the long run. While I know nothing about Qi, I do hope you’ve actually analyzed the risk of being somewhat weaker against the risk of potentially going completely insane, because it sounds absurd to a rational observer.”
I looked around dramatically. “There’s a rational observer here? Huh, I see a girl leading a youxia into a ghost hunt, but it couldn’t possibly be her.”
She stiffened, becoming as robotic as she’d been when we’d first met. God, I hated when she did that. “If, after I’ve described my plan to you, and you feel it insufficient, you are of course free to decline.”
I groaned. “Maki, relax. You made a good point, I was just—”
“Stop. Your point was…also valid.” She took a deep breath. “Forgive me. I can see why you might think that, but I assure you, once you’ve heard what I’ve prepared, you’ll understand.”
“Don’t sweat it. It could be outright suicidal and I’d still probably be down.” I gave her the cheesiest, most himbofied grin that I could. “That’s just the way I do things.”
Maki snapped me a glare and came to a sudden stop. I recognized the look, that was the face of someone who just remembered something they had been angry about for a while. She spun me around to face her.
“I really hate that you feel the need to slip into this ‘Stupid Hunk’ act of yours.” She gestured with her head back at the carved groove I’d left in the bricks, “That was a poetic statement earlier; it concisely and effectively conveyed a very complex argument. In fact, I’ve seen you act deliberately and with cunning in almost everything you’ve done since we first interacted. It’s insulting that there is even a part of you that believes I could or would buy into this ridiculous farce. I understand you may have developed this routine to comfort those intimidated by your appearance, but as you know, I don’t find you attractive. And for your consideration, I want it to be known that I don’t enjoy spending my time with idiots, pretend or not.”
I raised an eyebrow. Who was she trying to convince?
“Gee, Maki, you keep complementing me like this, and I’m going to start believing this is a real date.”
I had to fight back another himbofied grin, this one a genuine reaction. There was something about an angry Maki that made my heart start racing. She was just too fun to tease. And certainly, this version of her, with color in her cheeks and actual human emotion in her eyes, was far superior to the unfeeling gynoid she tried to present herself as.
Right, that was the reason I found it cute. It had nothing to do with the notion that I was a tsundere fanatic, a rumor that had haunted me since high school, went I went through a chain of relationships with particularly headstrong women. I’ll admit, my last long term girlfriend, Maria, happened to have some tsundere tendencies, but that wasn’t why I stayed with her. I stayed with her because she had a legendary ass, and was fun to spend time with, despite her tendency to harp on me.
Not that my very reasonable protests stopped my friends from digging in on it. They went particularly wild after we covered Freud and the Oedipus Complex in social studies – that Austrian, cocaine-addled pervert doomed me. My mother being famously strict, and domineering had nothing to do with my romantic tastes.
Maki barely reminded me of my mother at all. Outside of the fact that they were both Asian, smart, straightforward, stubborn, and frequently irritated by my behavior, they were nothing alike. Hell, they could have been basically identical, and it wouldn’t have mattered, because that was not a thing happening in my brain, at all. The only reason I would even consider hooking up with Maki was for the Experience Points. For one, I felt weird and a little gross invalidating her prior sexual identity with my Social feats, and two, frankly, I found her annoying.
Which I didn’t find attractive.
And it definitely, for certain, wasn’t the primary reason I really wanted to lean in and steal a kiss right now. Which I didn’t even want to do, more or less. It was merely an intrusive thought, that was all.
I pinched her cheek lightly and let her slap my hand away. A wild flash of anger came upon her before she paused, caught herself, and gave me an annoyed look as if to say, ‘You thought that would work?’
“For the record, Maki, I am an idiot. And I hate to break it to you like this, but so are you.”
She crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. “Explain.”
I laughed, picking up Maki by the waist and took a few steps into a very narrow and purely functional alleyway, out of sight from passing strangers. Her breath hitched as I did, shocked by the ease with which I could carry her, or perhaps the audacity of it all. I put her down with her back against a dry brick wall, sheltered in the shadow of an old HVAC unit above. I leaned in close, one hand on her lower back pulling her against me and the other on her cheek and neck. This was so that we could talk semi-privately, I told myself, and while the system did make me roll a Seduction check, that was incidental to my actual intentions. I almost felt bad about the four Successes, to tell the truth.
“Let me impart some Li-family wisdom to you, Maki-chan. We like to say, ‘You’re only as clever as your actions.’ So no matter how reasonable you think you are, no matter how well you’ve studied, or how intelligent you may be, if you’re doing dumb shit, you are dumb.”
“As I’ve said—”
“I don’t care. Listen, just hear me out. Smart people don’t make plans to illicitly break into the Shinto shrine afterhours, they don’t agree to needlessly risk their lives alongside people they’ve known for less than half a day, and they sure as shit don’t run towards killer ghosts.”
Her eyes were starting to water as she glared up at me. “So we should, what, quit?”
I flicked her earlobe. “Obviously not. I already told you I’m in this win or fail, live or die. This city needs idiots like us. But just because we have to be stupid, doesn’t mean we have to be crazy.”
Maki grit her teeth. “Now I’m insane—”
I wanted to say, ‘Maki, you are clearly not okay.’ And, ‘Every time you go emotionally glacial, I get incredibly creeped out,’ but these were not helpful statements. No, I needed to try a different approach. Luckily for me, I had the Skills and Attributes to back it up.
“This is a vendetta, right?” She went stiff in my arms, her face freezing in a rictus of anger. “Yeah, thought so. That’s why you aren’t allowed to pursue this exorcism? Maybe someone went after this ghost the last time it showed up and didn’t come back, is what I’m guessing.”
Her eyes slipped from my own, migrating towards my chest and focusing on some distant point past the horizon. It was all the confirmation I needed.
“You’ve probably been focusing nonstop on this for the past few years. Researching, training, getting ready to take your vengeance, right?” I continued, utilizing a particularly good Empathy roll to keep pushing. I gently pushed her chin up and waited for her eyes to focus again. “That’s good. I approve of all of that. And yeah, you weren’t dumb when you were doing your preparation. I imagine you pushed your mind and mental endurance to the limit pretty often. But, Maki, I think if you’re being honest with yourself, you were probably pretty nuts during all that.”
The anger drained from her face, but the robot didn’t return. Maki was present and listening, skeptically, I could tell, but she was listening.
“Again, that was good. Preparation is the time to be crazy and smart. You needed to withdraw into your little bubble and single-mindedly pursue revenge in order for us to have gotten to where we are.”
I had no idea where I was going with this, I was just running my mouth, letting my brain freestyle for a bit. But there was yet another seven Success, Charisma + Persuasion roll backing it up, so I was confident my mouth was running somewhere intentional.
“But now we have reached the point of action. We need to have our heads in the game if we’re to survive. We need to observe reality as it is. When you do that thing where you shut off your emotions and go all Terminator with it, that’s you denying reality; that’s you ignoring a big part of yourself. That worked great when you were in the library ignoring concerned phone calls from your friends and family.”
She winced. I gently lifted her cheek so that she was looking at me again.
“But tonight, we need to examine everything that is really happening, around us and within us, and then to reliably do the dumb thing anyway, which, again, is the part where we actually go and try to exorcise the undefeated, martial artist exterminating, Hungry Ghost. You know what most people would say if we told them what we’re doing tonight? They’d say, ‘What are you, fucking stupid?’ And you know what I’d say? I’d say, ‘Hell to the motherfucking yes I am.’ You know what I’m saying?”
There was a long pause as we stared into each other’s eyes. Light rain pattered against aluminum ventilation, and a few curious strangers glanced our way as they passed us. To them, we were the cover of a romance novel, two lovers totally consumed by one another.
Then my eyes slowly drifted to the side as I started to think about what I just said. What the hell was I talking about? Had I leaned too hard into the Himboforce? Because even I didn’t know where I was going with that. Maybe you couldn’t just let a good roll take over for you. Or maybe, the best way to come across as stupid, is to be stupid.
Maki pressed against my chest lightly. I obliged her, backing up and giving her some space. “I disagree,” she said, “with almost everything you just said. Your worldview is preposterous, pointlessly self-destructive, and exists only to justify your own unhinged desire to play the hero.”
She looped her arm through mine again and started pulling me along beside her back on our way. “And another thing! Nothing you said addresses the fact that it is annoying when you pretend to be dumber than you actually are. You shouldn’t debase yourself to make others more comfortable, and doing so with me when in private insults both of our intelligences.”
“Aiyah, Maki, I’m telling you, those are the real dumbass thoughts that run through my head. I have poor impulse control, woman. Don’t take it so personally.”
I was smiling widely, taking short, shuffling steps to match her quick pace. Maki’s words may have denied the validity of what I’d said, but she was notably more animated and alive. She had a frenetic energy to her, was speaking with her hands, and her facial expressions displayed a range of emotions. Granted, it was all in service of yelling at me, and all of those expressions were some variation of ‘irritated’, but still, I counted it as my win.
She glanced up at me and narrowed her eyes as if reading my thoughts. “You can’t wax philosophical at me and possibly still maintain that position. And why do you sound proud of your impulse control problems?!”
“If I were smarter, my argument would have worked though, right?” I shot her my smuggest grin, daring her to call me out.
“Ugh, look.” She came to a stop and pointed at a narrow door up a flight of stairs. The sign above it was in Japanese with small English lettering beneath. We stepped to the side as the bell above the door jingled to let some people step out. “Tamaki Grill. We were basically here before you, you…decided to pick me up and have your way with me, you impatient brute. The whole point of coming here was for the privacy of a booth!”
“What can I say? I just can’t control myself around you, Maki-chan. You’re too delectable.” I waved at the woman and her family who were halfway down the steps. “Oh hi, Mrs. Carter, fancy seeing you here! How was the food?”
The middle-aged woman returned my smile, her twin daughters giggling behind their hands. Her husband non-verbally congratulated me for my date with an amused grin.
“Hello, James! It’s been so long! And we haven’t had a chance to sit down yet, there’s a bit of a wait.” She gestured to her family. “This is my husband, Steve, and my daughters, Lana and Sarah. I don’t know if you remember them; they were freshman the year you graduated.”
“Hey, nice seeing you again. This is Maki. Maki, Mrs. Carter was my English teacher for three out of four years in high school.”
Maki, for her part, had turned bright crimson and was staring intently at the sidewalk between us and the Carters. “Hi,” she nearly squeaked, “nice to meet you.”
The twins giggled again, earning a chiding look from their mother. “Nice to meet you too, Maki. Well, I won’t keep you from booking a table. We’re going to try our hands at the crane games next door. Have fun kids, and stay safe!”
One of the girls laughed out loud. “Yeah, James, keep it wrapped up,” she said. “Real smooth, mom.”
Mrs. Carter sipped her teeth. “Get your head of the gutter, Lana. Bye, James!”
I waited for them to pass through the door to the little arcade next door before turning to Maki. “‘Have my way with you’? Such a weird way to put that. Made it sound like I fingered you in the alley.”
She elbowed me. “I was trying to be discrete! You didn’t have to make it worse! ‘Can’t control yourself around me’, really?”
“It’s called improv, Maki, I was doing a ‘Yes, And’. Now, do me a favor and try your hardest to not imply we’re going to fuck in the booth when we make the reservation.”